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Advancing science through public-private partnerships: Key to success
J. SLAVIN (1). (1) University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.
In a perfect world, all good ideas would find research support and we would have evidence-based answers for all our important questions. Let's return to the real research world in 2013. Food science research has traditionally been supported by USDA; but much of this funding has gravitated toward larger project grants with a specific focus, for example, childhood obesity. The situation in nutrition is somewhat better since nutrition research can be supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH research is competitive with less than 10% of submitted grants receiving funding. To write a competitive grant requires pilot results often obtained with small research grants from commodity groups or companies. Certain commodity groups have invested heavily in research, dairy, almonds, for example and as a result have a strong research base for dietary recommendations. A typical long research path would be to generate some epidemiologic studies that show disease protection with your ingredient and then conduct some strong clinical trials showing improvements in biomarkers. Even foods that we generally accept as "healthy" have a limited evidence-base for their protective properties. The cost of clinical studies is quite daunting and the best models pool resources to generate more research funding - checkoffs for agricultural products are in this category. In the past most of this research funding went to production agriculture, but increasingly these funds are being directed to health and nutrition. Public-private partnerships work well in our peer-review world, but are increasingly under attack. Science in the future will require partnerships among universities, the government, commodity groups, and industry to move our research agenda forward.
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